FSDB is package of commands for manipulating flat-ASCII databases from shell scripts. FSDB is useful to process medium amounts of data (with very little data you'd do it by hand, with megabytes you might want a real database). Fsdb was known as Jdb from 1991 to Oct. 2008. Fsdb is very good at doing things like: - extracting measurements from experimental output - re-examining data to address different hypotheses - joining data from different experiments - eliminating/detecting outliers - computing statistics on data (mean, confidence intervals, correlations, histograms) - reformatting data for graphing programs Rather than hand-code scripts to do each special case, FSDB provides higher-level functions. Although it's often easy throw together a custom script to do any single task, I believe that there are several advantages to using this library: it is higher-level than raw perl, control uses names intead of column numbers, it is self-documenting, and it is very robust (error cases, careful memory handling, etc.).